# Product-Led Blockchain Development by Gregory Rocco | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Gregory Rocco](https://streameth.org/speakers/gregory-rocco)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 08:40
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-RIyvlEGFyHo
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyvlEGFyHo

## Description

As teams spin up new app-specific rollups and L2s, we've moved into an era of product-led blockchain development. In this model, developers are not only building the first product or client to leverage their protocol, but establishing what ‘product-defined blockspace’ means. 

In this talk, I go over the history of product-led growth, how it evolved to product-led protocol development in web3, and finally, what product-led blockchain development means in the context of app-specific rollups.

Speaker(s): Gregory Rocco
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Usability
Keywords: development, product

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] hello everyone my name is Gregory Roco as mentioned and um I tried to figure out what I could do in a short amount of time for a lightning talk I felt like you'd have a lot of Highly specific technical talks so I figured I'd give product a go when it comes to giving one of these so the title itself is product Le blockchain development so it's kind of covering the whole lineage of going from product Le growth for startups to uh product Le protocol development which was originally coined by Dan Romero a couple years ago and thinking about forecaster and then finally product Le blockchain development which is this new era of everyone uh seemingly wanting their own block space for some strange reason but we'll we'll figure it out eventually um but the subtitle here is why you're wrong and the market is Right deals specifically with making sure that whenever you think about uh product development protocol development or even blockchain development that you are serving some customer need and not your own interests to a certain degree you have to be in what you're doing but at the same time you have to serve a market um and a disclaimer to this talk is that I was a founder and I was wrong plenty of times I specifically started my career in uh this space in decentralized identity which namely is a hard space to crack when it comes to product development and probably there are just very few uh companies and protocols that have done it maybe ens is the closest to product Market Market fit when it comes to Identity um but user Control credentials generally were quite tough um going back into the core basics of product development one of the kind of core pillars there is product L growth namely that's whenever you build a product you specifically have to make sure that customer needs and customer experience are at the Forefront dictating everything that you do and become the full kind of motion for what you do so feedback comes in you then take that feedback as a product developer and that's what influences engineering design messaging and everything in between it shouldn't come from oh just one more feature and all these users are going to use it it never works out that way it's specifically the case of someone requesting a feature from what you build you bring something to Market you get your initial set of users and you're constantly using that messaging to inform what you're going to do and all the decisions you're going to make when thinking about product development this was the framework for a long time when it came to startups it's what I was indoctrinated with when I went through Y combinator and then later in the space since we're all kind of building these emerging protocols and blockchains uh the framework had to be changed a little bit because it was a bit of like a blue ocean space when it came to protocol development uh kind of fast forward a little bit later and you have the situations where developers do developer things where the developer might have an interesting idea and might have some problems bringing it to Market specifically because they're just kind of handing a protocol over to someone and saying here build on this build all these great ideas on my protocol it'll be great but the problem is it's not taking those first principles into account and a couple of years ago Dan Romero from forcaster put out a post post post called Product Le protocol development and it's specifically dealt with the the idea that as a protocol developer you're building the first apps and clients that leverage your own protocol and are then taking the feedback from those to inform protocol development namely in his case there are three core tenants of product lied protocol development the first is that users use apps and clients they don't use protocols so in let's use foraster for the sake of the example users are using warp cast they're kind of making posts they're interacting with the application and on the back end it's forast the protocol that's kind of informing all these interactions the second thing is that a developer worth their salt will make sure that they are concerned with meaningful daily active users instead of the coolest technology that they want to use a developer that's building for an audience specifically and not experimenting and the third and final part of it is that Protocols are valued based on the clients and app success that build on set protocol so it's always making sure that apps and clients are at the center here and then if you're building a protocol you are defining the blueprint for how that protocol should be used by being informed of what's happening on these apps and clients that people are actually using and then finally to round it out complication requires a bit of order recently in the space we're finding protocols wanting to have their own block space building app specific rollups and I think just the bottom line of all this is just making sure that if you kind of go down this route that you have to be the block space you want to see in the world you have to make sure that when you're building this you are building the killer app leveraging this block space that you're not going the usual route of building this thing and saying hey everyone we're going to get a growth marketer to bring a million developers through the door and then they're going to build a whole bunch of stuff on our new protocol and it's going to be great it's like no you're going to be building the app that specifically leverages this for what you designed it to do and if it doesn't work out well then you might need to hit the drawing board again but it's all specifically going back to this core idea of product Le growth where you are presenting something to the market you're presenting the end users with something to use they are then informing what happens with that and everything in between so kind of returning to First principles I encourage experimentation but at the end of the experimentation if you do wish to bring something to Market please keep designing and developing with users in mind and making sure those users are able to give you feedback to inform the next stages of what you're building so thanks thanks a lot Gregory and now we have a little bit of time for questions wow someone's ready I can I can see that all right let me get this box to you ready and go hello thank you don't I'm I'm curious to have your opinion about the fact like don't you think like the space is even design to not incentivize like competition between different rollups because they're all looking to attract liquidity attract user and just grow like individually and so this doesn't go in pair with like taking care of re user because they compete for user they compete for liquidity and there is like a lack of interoperability really so what are your thoughts on this so in the case of like very app specific case you're then competing with others like we don't need all those rollups no we don't like it's it's it's unnecessary like I think I'm an agreement with you we we don't to a certain extent but making sure that if you were building something to then build in in those use cases at the same time um or I might not be understanding the question correctly well I think like the the the space is designed in a way like everyone want to talk own rollup get users get liquidity but at the end like we're not building something that actually can be useful for people like and it's also sometimes just Ser serving like the ecosystem but to an extent so if there is a dominant use case that's an app specific rollup then good for that my hope it it masses the most amount of liquidity in in that only way and dominates that space if it's providing a good enough of experience like I'm I I want to allow the ability for anyone to create that app specific rollup but at the same time I want to very like I want someone to win and that's okay because it means user getting the value and if if that app specific roll turns around and does something against user wants there's another app specific roll up kind of waiting for that or waiting for that user base okay thank you is there another question because otherwise I another one here yes there are others so um so you essentially mentioned that you developers should focus on building a product that the market wants um what makes it and we see that most companies actually have are having a hard time doing this what do you think makes it so difficult to apply that very easy fundamental first principle thinking I think being the space for a number of years um everyone there's there's a lot of cases where people aren't working uh deeply enough or pinpoint enough on a very specific issue um namely that good good example like let's let's use a hypothetical of like social protocols or like a someone building a chain for like all the social protocols they're thinking mostly about this is again a hypothetical but like we're going to amass all the social protocols they're going to be using our chain they different clients and all that without building the very specific client themselves and saying we're going to be offering this experience first as a first class citizen they're thinking too much about offer it to everyone before let's get the experience right and figure out how to then open it up and I think that's been a part of the thinking or an issue with the thinking for a long time it's ambitious and it's very like a good thing overall but at the same time it becomes difficult to provide that very narrow experience or solve that very specific problem before thinking too widely and I think you have to balance both of that when When developing and designing